Professor Komla Aggor wins Carnegie Fellowship

Professor Komla Aggor has been awarded a fellowship by the Carnegie African Diaspora Fellowship Program (CADFP) to travel to Ghana and work with the University of Ghana’s School of Languages on a curriculum co-development project.

Aggor will collaborate with Dr. Joanna Boampong, Senior Lecturer of Spanish at the Department of Modern Languages, and engage with the faculty to revise and enhance the curriculum of the Spanish undergraduate and graduate programs. As part of the concrete steps necessary for achieving the University of Ghana’s goal of attaining world-class status, Professor Aggor is expected to help the Spanish Section review thoroughly its courses to reflect world-class standards. He will share his experience in creating a balanced program with a drive toward interdisciplinary collaboration. He will also facilitate faculty development workshops aimed at exposing the host faculty members to best practices within the academe.

The Spanish Section will draw on Aggor’s expertise to put strategies in place that will reassure and encourage undergraduate students to enroll in the graduate programs on offer. Additionally, he will evaluate and help to fine-tune and consolidate the curriculum as well as the research agenda of the recently-established Center for Latin American Studies. As the first such Center to be established in West Africa, it is envisioned that it will serve as a hub in the sub-region for engagement with Latin America through scholarship, consulting and outreach.

The University of Ghana project is one of 43 projects that will pair African Diaspora scholars with one of 35 higher education institutions and collaborators in Africa to work together on curriculum co-development, research, graduate teaching, training and mentoring activities in the next few months of 2017. The visiting Fellows will work with their hosts on a wide range of projects that include research in banking and finance; developing curriculum in therapeutics and environmental toxicology; mentoring faculty in computer science; and teaching and mentoring graduate students in media and communications and in a new interdisciplinary public health program. To deepen the ties among the faculty members and between their home and host institutions, the program is providing support to several program alumni to enable them to build on successful collaborative projects they conducted in previous years.

The Carnegie African Diaspora Fellowship Program, now in its fourth year, is designed to reverse Africa’s brain drain, build capacity at the host institutions, and develop long-term, mutually-beneficial collaborations between universities in Africa and the United States and Canada. It is funded by Carnegie Corporation of New York and managed by the Institute of International Education (IIE) in collaboration with United States International University-Africa (USIU-Africa) in Nairobi, Kenya, which coordinates the activities of the Advisory Council. A total of 282 African Diaspora Fellowships have now been awarded for scholars to travel to Africa since the program’s inception in 2013. Fellowships match host universities with African-born scholars (individually or in small groups) and cover the expenses for project visits of between 14 and 90 days, including transportation, a daily stipend, and the cost of obtaining visas and health insurance.

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